Need help MS Office 2011 -Lion

Wish it worked like Office '97.
In Excel, I have a spreadsheet with bank account numbers, 14 digits. I keep trying to format as General, as Excel wants them in Scientific. Any way to correct?
In Word, The Auto fill for today's date is September 23, 11. How do I change that so the default is September 23, 2011? Used multiple versions of Word and never saw the year displayed like that.

The two digit year was just mentioned by someone else this week. There's a MS knowledge base article about it. I've spoken to our Technical Accounts Manager from MS, and they are aware of the issue, but no ETA of when it might be addressed, or how to work around it, apart from entering the date manually.

For the 14-digit number, set it to "Number" rather than "General." Even "Text" will convert it into scientific notation for some strange reason. Maybe if the cell was made Text first, it would hold.

The two digit year was just mentioned by someone else this week. There's a MS knowledge base article about it. I've spoken to our Technical Accounts Manager from MS, and they are aware of the issue, but no ETA of when it might be addressed, or how to work around it, apart from entering the date manually.

For the 14-digit number, set it to "Number" rather than "General." Even "Text" will convert it into scientific notation for some strange reason. Maybe if the cell was made Text first, it would hold.

Thank you,
Seems somedays, no matter how much you search, you don't see those earlier posts. Sometimes, it's all in how you ask the question.
Problem, it was a Office 97 spreadsheet being used in Open Office. I waited for Lion to get a new Mac and just imported the spreadsheet. Too much to reformat. At least MS finally lets you have spreadsheets with several 100K of lines. Used to have to use Quattro Pro.